1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computer systems that communicate on the Internet, and more specifically to a system and method for tracking the effectiveness of advertising campaigns over Internet systems.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Advertising over the Internet has become extremely common. In many cases, paid advertising is the primary source of revenue for Internet content providers. For others, advertisements can direct potential customers to additional products available, and promote products that the content provider wants or needs to sell.
An important goal of advertising, especially in a medium such as the Internet, is to direct the advertising to customers most likely to buy the product. Various types of customer profiling is becoming common, with choice of advertisements dynamically selected based upon information collected about the person accessing a web page, and upon purchasing or viewing patterns that person is currently demonstrating. An example of such advertising technique is found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,710,887, issued to Chelliah et al. Many other examples of advertising based upon purchaser identification are known in the art.
One common advertising technique is to provide a selected portion of a web page for displaying advertisements. This portion is usually at the top of a displayed page, where a potential purchaser will encounter it when the page is first loaded. If the person viewing the page is interested in the product or service depicted in the advertisement, usually clicking on the advertisement will take that person to another web page where the product or service can be purchased, or additional information found. This approach is often generally referred to as banner advertising, because the selected portion is a rectangular banner shape at the top of the page.
Numerous approaches are in use for selecting the particular ads to be displayed to a particular customer. A common problem with many approaches is determining how effective they are, during and after an advertising campaign. Although various purchaser profiles can be selected in advance to determine which customers will be shown which advertisements, it is often difficult to find out after the fact whether the campaign was, in fact, effective.
It would be desirable to provide a system and method that not only allowed advertising campaigns to be defined, but that allowed the effectiveness of the campaign to be monitored. It would further be desirable for such a system and method to be compatible with current web-based Internet systems, and be easy to use.